What Is a Meta Description? Length, Example and Tips

Back when the year read 2002, the most influential search engines in the world looked at three basic HTML elements on a web page: the title, the meta description and the meta keywords. Once Google started indexing the whole content of a page, meta keywords lost their importance, but the meta description did not. This article is about the meta description, which has held on to its importance all that time, and about why it still matters. Just below you can check your own site's meta description and get a reading on its length.

Meta Description Test Tool

What Is a Meta Description?

The meta description tag is a snippet of HTML that sits in the head of a web page and summarizes the content of that page. Using meta description tags is considered one of the best practices while you do search engine optimization (SEO).

A meta description written well works to persuade readers, right there in the SERP, that your page holds the information they are looking for. In SEO terms we can call the meta description the second most important piece of the meta tags, after the title.

An Example of a Meta Description

Meta descriptions are usually placed after the title. An example of the “meta description code” looks like this:

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Why Does the Meta Description Matter?

Google explained long ago that meta tags bring no direct benefit. In that statement from 2009 it noted that even when you write a meta description, Google sometimes does not use it. The reason, we can say, is that it found a sentence inside the page that matches the query better.

Why Google cares about the meta description:

For the Look of the SERP

So if there is no direct benefit, as Google itself says, why does it care about the meta description? The answer is plain enough: it wants the search results to look better.

For Describing Pages Without Text

With some web applications, Java and Flash among them, Google struggles to describe the content of the page. In cases like that it needs a description that says what the page holds. On a page that is nothing but a login screen, for instance, it may find no text at all. There the SEO specialist has to enter something like “the login screen where members of the Istanbul Pharmacists’ Association sign in to their membership.”

Its Effect on Clicks

The meta description is a piece of text, and it has to follow the grammar rules of the language you write in. If your meta description catches the eye, raises curiosity about the content and invites the reader to carry on, it can lift the clicks your site gets in the search results. That, in turn, can bring an improvement in rankings, not directly but by that indirect route.

What Makes a Meta Description Strong

Take in these points during your work as an SEO specialist and put them to use while you write meta descriptions.

• Keep it short and to the point
• Add a call to action (CTA)
• Keep it unique
• Address the subject
• Use the target keyword
• Watch out for special characters
• Keep the length optimal
• Do not use the quotation mark (“)

On that last point, do not use the (“) mark, which is part of the code itself. If you do, the meta description code may be read as having ended there.